Communist Memorial
Museum: A Monument to Murder
Radley Balko. www.CapitalismMagazine.com.
January 2, 2004.
One of the most powerful museums in Washington,
D.C., is the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It's the one site I always recommend to
people visiting the city, even though it
takes a couple of days to shake off the
malaise that settles in after you've seen
it.
It's a fitting memorial that accurately
documents and catalogues the horrors of
the Holocaust, without much propagandizing.
It allows history to stand on its own. The
events as they happened are quite enough.
It's time we had a similar museum to memorialize
the devastation wrought by communism.
Adolf Hitler has become the embodiment
of human evil, yet he wasn't the biggest
killer of the last century. He didn't even
come in second. He was third, behind two
communists, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung.
According to the historian R.J. Rummel,
Hitler's Nazis killed about 21million people
between 1933 and 1945, (a figure that includes
Roma gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped,
Poles, Russians, Jehova Witnesses and Germans,
as well as six million Jews.) Stalin killed
twice that many, and Mao killed just under
38 million. When you add in the murders
attributable to Lenin , Pol Pot, Tito and
the remaining communist dictators of Asia,
Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America,
communism claimed more than 100 million
lives. These estimates vary, but it's generally
accepted now among historians that communism
took far more lives than Nazism.
My aim here isn't to minimize the atrocities
of the Holocaust. My point is that communism
also killed millions -- perhaps hundreds
of millions -- this last century; it enslaved,
and continues to enslave, billions more.
And those are merely the costs we can estimate.
Far more speculative and difficult to measure
are the ways in which communism killed human
potential. The last century was the most
productive in human history: We cured diseases,
went to the moon, improved the human condition
in almost every way imaginable. Think of
what the human race might have accomplished
had billions of us not been imprisoned by
communism but been free to explore, stretch
and reach our potential through competition,
innovation and creativity.
There's really no telling what we might
have done.
Unfortunately, nearly 14 years after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the embers of communism
haven't yet flickered out. Anti-communists
cannot invoke the Holocaust survivors' cry
of "Never Again." They can't even
cry, "Not Right Now, At This Moment."
Right now, North Korea's communist regime
is imposing a famine on its own people,
with resulting deaths estimated in the millions.
Communist regimes continue to hold captive
the people of China, Laos, Vietnam and Cuba.
Human rights abuses abound in all five countries.
Yet communism is rarely regarded with the
same enmity we hold for Nazism. In fact,
communism today is downright trendy.
Most of us are justifiably revolted at
the sight of a teenage kid wearing a T-shirt
emblazoned with a swastika. But glimpse
the same kid in a shirt featuring a sickle
and hammer, or a portrait of Che Guevara,
and many of us will find him quaint, perhaps
idealistic -- at the very worst, naïve
and misguided. In New York City, you can
get tipsy at the KGB Bar, a chic spot featuring
Soviet-era symbolism and paraphernalia.
Imagine what might become of the entrepreneur
who tried to open a nightspot themed with
Nazi regalia.
It's become fashionable of late for celebrities
to make high-profile pilgrimages to Cuba,
to be wined and dined by Fidel Castro. In
the time it takes to extol the virtues of
universal health care and education, you
can bet at least a dozen Cubans have risked
their lives to get out. Iconic director
Stephen Spielberg was the latest to make
the trip. You'd think the man who so eloquently
documented the brutality of totalitarianism
in "Schindler's List" would know
better than to cozy up to tyrants.
Even on communism's old stomping grounds,
there seems to be a twisted nostalgia for
the old days. Plans are underway for a communist
theme park in what was once East Berlin.
In Russia, home of the gulags, in a recent
poll a majority of Russians think "Uncle
Joe" Stalin did more good for Russia
than bad.
Bryan Caplan, an associate professor of
economics at George Mason University, maintains
the "Museum of Communism" Web
site. Caplan says the difference in the
way many of us perceive communism and Nazism
lies in the way we view each philosophy's
motives.
"People see communists as misguided
realists," Caplan says, "whereas
most of us know Nazis were brutal thugs."
In other words, we're willing to cut communism
slack because we've been led to believe
that the philosophy was driven by such noble
goals as equality and egalitarianism. That's
not the truth, of course. As Caplan documents
on his site, from Karl Marx and Vladimir
Lenin onward, communism has always been
driven by power. Slave labor and the "liquidation"
of dissidents were always part of the plan.
This is why a museum dedicated to preserving
communism's brutal legacy is necessary.
The philosophy's history isn't the result
of good intentions gone wrong; it's a perverse
theory of rights that's abhorrent and immoral
on its face. The former implies that if
done right, communism might work someday.
The latter correctly concludes that it ought
not ever be tried again.
One such project is already underway. The
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
has been raising money toward a museum for
several years now. The organization plans
to build an online "virtual" museum
first, then a standing memorial in Washington,
D.C., with a final eye toward a bricks-and-mortar
memorial similar to the Holocaust Museum.
But there's a problem with the project's
funding. Project Director Jay Katzen says
that although initial plans called for the
museum to be funded entirely with private
donations, the challenges of private fund
raising has led the group to seek public
dollars. Katzen says he's secured a pledge
from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., to
match a taxpayer dollar for each dollar
raised privately. I find it almost obscene
to build a monument to the evils of state
coercion with money coerced by the state
from its citizens. A memorial to communism
that's in any way funded with taxpayer dollars
would stand devoid of any real moral value
at all.
Perhaps another group will come forward.
Perhaps some established capitalist who
has made his millions will decide that a
philosophy that has left a trail of 100
million dead does not deserve favor, or
hipster status, or even indifference --
but scorn, derision and condemnation.
When you leave Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust
Museum, you leave sick, heartbroken and
burdened with the atrocities of Nazism.
It's time we had a building that evoked
similar feelings from communism.
Distributed by NetforCuba International.
http://www.netforcuba.org
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